Film / The Magnificent Seven (1960)

They fought like seven hundred!

Vin: I guess right about now you kinda wish you'd given your crops to Calvera, huh?

Hilario: Yes. And no. Both at the same time. Yes, when I think of what he might do. No, when I remember the feeling in my chest this morning as I saw him running away — from us. That's a feeling worth dying for. Have you ever... felt something like that?

Vin: Not for a long, long time. I, uh, I envy you.

An epic 1960 Western translation of Seven Samurai, directed by John Sturges and featuring an All-Star Cast that includes Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Horst Buchholz, and Brad Dexter.

Mexican villagers plagued by a band of bandits send a few of their number to the border to buy guns so they can defend themselves. They end up hiring seven gunmen to defend the village instead.

Action-packed and boasting an unforgettable music score by Elmer Bernstein (by the way, a young John Williams played piano on Bernstein's score), The Magnificent Seven has so much testosterone that women risk getting pregnant just by watching it. Numerous film historians call it one of the last great "classical" Westerns (i.e., Westerns prior to the rise of the Spaghetti Western subgenre).

Followed by several sequel films and a 1998-2000 TV series.

Return of the Seven, the first sequel, has the village from the first film be raided by marauders who carry off fifty men into the desert, one of them being Chico, who chose to return and settle down after the first film. Chico's wife goes to the other survivors of the first Band of Seven, Chris and Vin, who recruit five new members to save Chico and the other villages from a mad rancher who is using them as slave labor.

Guns of the Magnificent Seven, the second sequel, has a Mexican revolutionary (and a cousin of one of the villages from one of the previous films) seek out and hire Chris to form a third iteration of the Band of Seven to overthrow a sadistic militarist.

The Magnificent Seven Ride, the final sequel, has Chris, now married and a US Marshal, be recruited by an old friend of his turned Bounty Hunter to form a new Band of Seven to defeat the bandit lord De Toro.

The series, meanwhile, has no connection to the film quadrilogy at all.

A remake of the first film was released in September 2016, directed by Antoine Fuqua and with Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke heading the cast.

For the ensemble/plot trope, see The Magnificent Seven Samurai.

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Examples of tropes included:

• Accidental Aiming Skills: Britt kills a bandit fleeing on horseback with a single pistol shot from a longish distance. When Chico calls it the best shot he's ever seen, Britt calls it the worst — he had aimed for the horse, because he wanted to take one of the bandits alive and question him about the strength of the bandit group.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: Vin and Hilario have the page quote conversation in the middle of a firefight. The scene where Lee wakes from a nightmare and talks about losing his nerve counts, too.
• Adapted Out: Petra's father, the counterpart of Manzo from Seven Samurai, is mentioned but never appears.
• Adaptation Expansion: Given that the bandits' leader is given zero characterization and five minutes of screen time in Seven Samurai, Calvera received one of these in spades. Eli Wallach was reluctant to take the role until he was assured this would happen. Several of the Seven are similarly developed, such as Heihachi's counterpart Bernardo having the baggage of being mixed-race and dealing with an Instant Fan Club of boys who don't fully understand the sad and lonely life he leads, or Gorobei's counterpart Harry being a figure motivated by greed more than eternal loyalty to an old friend.
• Adaptation Title Change: The Magnificent Seven is a Western remake of the Japanese film Seven Samurai.
• Affably Evil: Calvera qualifies as either this or Faux Affably Evil. Either way, he's too much fun to watch. During the making of the film, Yul Brynner (Chris) remarked that Eli Wallach was too benevolent.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Calvera's death is surprisingly poignant. As he sits slumped against a wooden rail, mortally wounded, he desperately tries to understand why the seven returned to save the village.
  You came back... to a place like this. Why? A man like you...why?
• And Starring: "And introducing Horst Buchholz" appears at the very end of the cast, separate from his six Magnificent co-stars and Eli Wallach. This wasn't Buchholz's first movie role, but it was the first time American audiences got a good look at him.
• Anyone Can Die: What did you expect from a western based on a film by Akira Kurosawa?
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The Seven wonder why the bandits keep attacking them instead of going off to find easier pickings. They learn that the bandits haven't eaten in days and if they don't get the village's food, they will starve.
• Avengers Assemble: Chris ends up delivering The Call. Vin even holds up fingers to count the members of their group when each new man joins.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Chico, like his partial counterpart Kikuchiyo in the original.
• Badass Boast: "We deal in lead, friend."
  Chris: No enemies?
  Lee: Alive...
  • The latter is subverted in a later scene with Lee, who bitterly echoes the line before admitting that he's lost count of his enemies.
• Bandito: Calvera and his gang of Mexican outlaws, travelling from village to village to steal what they can. Mustaches, ponchos, and bandoliers of ammunition are prevalent, and sombreros are so ubiquitous that all Chico needs to do is put one on to infiltrate the bandit camp.
• Batman Cold Open: The film does a Western variation (escorting a dead Indian to a cemetery whilst under fire) of the Batman Cold Open from Kurosawa's original. It both establishes Chris and Vin's creds as awesome gunslingers and solidifies their respect for each other as men of similar principles and courage.
• Beard of Evil: Calvera.
• Big Bad: Calvera, leader of a band of rapacious and desperate bandits.
• Bittersweet Ending: The seven killed all of the bandits, but four of the seven also died. One of the survivors gives up on adventure, while the other two ride off to a future without prospects.
  The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We'll always lose.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Chris does this to two of the gunmen preventing him and Vin from taking the dead Indian to the cemetery. It's played with a bit more realism than many examples: the men thus disarmed are visibly injured and bleeding afterwards.
• Bond One-Liner: Britt is challenged to a Duel to the Death by a Sore Loser gunslinger who can't believe his gun lost a speed contest to Britt's throwing knife. Britt kills him with the knife before the guy can even grab his gun:
  Britt: You lost.
• Boomerang Bigot: Chico, who grew up as a farmer, really hates farmers. The film lifted this directly from Seven Samurai: the seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo, tries hard to become a samurai and is constantly boasting and showing off — before he tearfully admits that he came from a family of selfish farmers.
• Brownface: The Polish-American Jewish Eli Wallach plays a Mexican bandit. And not for the last time, either.
• Call to Agriculture: Chico, in spite of explicitly stating in an earlier scene that he had no intention of settling down, does exactly this at the end.
• Canon Foreigner: Of all the characters, Lee is the only one who isn't directly adapted from Seven Samurai (instead filling the space left open by combining Kikuchiyo and Katsushiro into Chico). His characterization as a fighter who's lost his nerve would have been unbecoming of any samurai.
  • Harry's natural counterpart is Gorobei, yet shares none of his characterisation.
• Catapult Nightmare: Lee not only bolts upright, but also scrambles across the room in a panic when he awakens from a bad dream.
• The Centerpiece Spectacular: The first confrontation with Calvera and the bandits, which leads to a round of back-to-back Badass Boasts.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: This happens a couple of times during the Avengers Assemble section, but the best example of the trope happens when Harry returns for the Final Battle.
• Chekhov's Gun: Britt's knife-throwing subverts this trope; in the final gunfight, he draws the blade, but gets killed before he can throw it.
• Clothing Damage: Chico's hat gets a hole shot through it. Britt gives him a sombrero to replace it, which comes in handy when infiltrating Calvera's camp.
• Composite Character: Chico is a composite of Katsushiro, the young samurai who begins a relationship with a village girl, and Kikuchiyo, the boisterous samurai wannabe who tags along with the others uninvited and turns out to be a peasant by birth.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Chris wears rich, dark-colored clothing, but is a hero.
• Deadpan Snarker: Vin is full of extremely deadpan snark. O'Reilly is also an example, somewhat less deadpan:
  Chris: Morning. I'm a friend of Harry Luck's. He tells me you're broke.
  O'Reilly: [chopping wood] Nah. I'm doing this because I'm an eccentric millionaire.
  • The traveling clothes salesman, Henry is quite memorable for his witty remarks about the "Old Sam" situation. As is the undertaker, Chamlee.
  Chamlee: For twenty dollars, I'd plant anybody with a hoop and a holler. But the funeral is off.
  Henry: Now how do you like that. I want him buried, you want him buried and if he could sit up and talk, he'd second the motion. Now that's as unanimous as you can get.
• Debut Queue: As in the original film, the seven are introduced one scene at a time.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Lee, of the gunslinger archetype. His sharp eye, fast hands, and take-no-crap attitude has given him... a life of jumping at every shadow for fear of the next person to try to take his title, and paying exorbitant amounts of money to sleep in stables and storehouses because inn-keepers charge a man a lot when he's on the run.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Surprisingly averted. Petra slaps Chico when she first meets him. Then later she apologises and asks if it hurt.
• Dream Team: The seven consist of six of the best gunmen around and one rookie.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Chico successfully infiltrates Calvera's camp in a sombrero.
• The Drifter: At least three of the seven were drifters at the start. Chris was drifing towards the South when the villagers hire him, Vin is just wandering from place to place when he meets Chris, and Britt was traveling to no place in particular when Chris tracks him down.
• Due to the Dead: Chris' initiative to deliver Old Sam to Boot Hill to be buried against all odds is his Establishing Character Moment.
• Duel to the Death: Britt is forced into a deadly duel by a Sore Loser in his introduction scene.
• Dwindling Party: As in the original, four of the seven die. Whereas in the original, the samurai were killed as the story progressed, here, they all die in the climax.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Vin and Chris volunteer to drive a hearse containing an Indian up to Boot Hill despite the protests of the townspeople.
  • Harry signing on because he's convinced the village has riches.
  • Britt besting a gunmen with a knife. Twice.
  • Bernardo doesn't stop chopping wood as he snarks back at Chris.
  • Lee demanding his money up front to cover the exorbitant cost of his terrible lodgings.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Calvera is appalled at how little religion people have. Didn't stop him from robbing a church, though.
  • He also admits to the Seven that he can't get away so easily with his crimes in Texas, because he's Mexican, and the racial prejudice there forces harsher punishments on minorities.
• Everyone Meets Everyone: How the seven are introduced.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Calvera's last words to Chris were "You came back... for a place like this... Why? A man like you... Why?" The reason he let them go in the first place was because he thought they were all on the same terms, and thus they would never come back to save a bunch of farmers.
• Evil Is Hammy: Calvera owns every scene he's in with relish.
• Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: O'Reilly was once a highly-paid Bounty Hunter, but now works chopping wood for his breakfast, so he's willing to accept the measly pay the villagers are offering.
  "Twenty dollars? Right now, that's a lot."
• Fanfare: A great one by Elmer Bernstein.
• Fastest Gun in the West: Britt is fast with both guns and knives. Early in the movie, he shows just how fast he is by using a thrown knife to kill an opponent who has a gun.
• Foreign Remake: It was adapted from Seven Samurai, and made with Akira Kurasawa's blessing.
• Four Is Death: As in the original, the Seven lose four among their own number.
• Friend to All Children: Bernardo.
• Friendly Sniper: O'Reilly is on sniping duties on the rooftops.
• The Ghost: Petra's father, the film's counterpart of Manzo, is mentioned but never seen.
• Girly Run: Calvera does this if you look closely. Then again, it's Eli Wallach.
• The Gunslinger: All the seven are expert gunslingers recruited by Chris to defend a small Mexican town from bandits. Britt is unquestionably stated to be the best Quick Draw alive with both gun and knife and proves it, though it's not enough to keep him from being killed in the climactic firefight.
• The Gunfighter Wannabe: Chico. The rest of the group tries to dissuade him from going along with them, since they believe that his pride is only going to get himself killed.
• Hate Sink: The group of men in a town that deny a man burial on account of his race and are willing to murder anyone who tries. Their main purpose in a plot is as an Establishing Character Moment for Chris and Vin: The two gunfighters' sense of decency by volunteering to drive the hearse to the graveyard, their courage for doing so under fire, and finally their skills with a gun when challenged.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen:
  • O'Reilly was a well-paid Bounty Hunter; now he has to chop wood for a living, so even the measly pay the villagers are offering is a fortune.
  • Lee trying to catch flies in his hand. "There was a time I could have got all three."
• I Choose to Stay: In the end, Chico decides to abandon his ambitions of becoming a gunfighter and settles down in the village.
• I Gave My Word: After a discussion of all the good reasons for giving up and going home.
  Harry: Well, there comes a time to turn Mother's picture to the wall and get out. The village will be no worse off than it was before we came.
  Chris: You forget one thing. We took a contract.
  Vin: Not the kind any court would enforce.
  Chris: That's just the kind you've got to keep.
• Improbable Aiming Skills
  • The film plays it straight in some instances: several characters make shots on the run, shoot guns out of hands, and make otherwise improbable shots. It doesn't do this as badly as other Westerns from the same era, though.
  • The film averts this, too: Britt — acknowledged as one of the best gunmen of the group — takes several seconds to line up a pistol shot from a longish distance, and he still claims to have missed his intended target (see Accidental Aiming Skills above).
• Instant Fan Club: Deconstructed — the mob of kids who follow Bernardo O'Reilly around everywhere end up getting him killed as they wander out into a gunfight and he tries to get them into cover.
• Invulnerable Horses: Played with. Britt shoots a bandit off his horse at long range. After Chico compliments him, he demurs: "I was aiming for the horse."
  • In the big fight scenes, however, there are several instances of horses falling down from being shot, or being dragged down. They appear to be well-trained stunt animals.
• Irony: Lee is a wartime deserter "hiding in the middle of a battlefield".
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Discussed:
  Calvera: What I don't understand is why a man like you took the job in the first place, hmm? Why, huh?
  Chris: I wonder myself.
  Calvera: No, come on, come on, tell me why.
  Vin: It's like a fellow I once knew in El Paso. One day, he just took all his clothes off and jumped in a mess of cactus. I asked him that same question, 'Why?'
  Calvera: And?
  Vin: He said, 'It seemed to be a good idea at the time'.
• Jerkass: Wallace, the abrasive, bragging Sore Loser who tries to prove that he's faster than Britt. Thankfully, Britt puts him in his place.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: The Seven counted on the outlaws doing this and moving on to softer targets once the village put up a token resistance. However, they didn't realize that the outlaws were starving and didn't have anywhere else to go.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Chico lacks the patience of his more seasoned comrades, running into a shoot-out and nearly getting his head blown off and attempting to pistol-whip Calvera. In the latter case, Chris stops him from getting himself killed then and there.
• Let Them Die Happy: As Harry dies, he tells Chris that he'd "hate to die a sucker" and asks one more time what the big secret was, prompting Chris to assure him that they were fighting for "Gold. Sacks of it."
• Letting Her Hair Down: Petra is introduced with her hair in pigtails when she's at odds with Chico. As she falls for him, her hair is worn looser.
• Look What I Can Do Now!: When Chico first tries to join the seven, Chris tests him by having him clap before Chris can draw his gun, and he is unable to do so. When they meet him later on the trail, his reflexes have improved to the point that he is catching fish with his bare hands, and he is accepted into the group.
• Magnetic Hero: About the first third of the film consists of gathering the seven using this.
• The Magnificent Seven Samurai: This film serves as the co-Trope Namer.
  • The Hero: Chris.
  • The Lancer: Vin.
  • The Big Guy: Britt.
  • The Smart Guy: Lee.
  • The Mentor: Harry.
  • The Young Guy: Chico.
  • The Funny Guy: Bernardo.
• Meaningful Name: Chico means "Kid" in Spanish.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Big Bad's name sounds a whole lot like calavera: "skull".
• Men of Sherwood: The villagers need to hire the eponymous gunmen to have a chance against the bandits, but they're willing to help out in the climax and handle themselves well.
• Mythology Gag:
  • When Chico is following the group, and seems to have given up already, Harry says, "Now that he's gone, I kind of miss him." This is a line borrowed from Heihachi, who had spoken too soon when he thought that Kikuchiyo had given up following them.
  • After Chico brought the farmers together with a Bavarian Fire Drill and shamed them with a small monologue, Chris says, "Now we are seven", another line borrowed from Heihachi.
  • Vin asks the village boys if they've got a pretty older sister. Kikuchiyo asks the same thing at one point.
  • Harry is introduced trying to pull a similar trick with a doorway that Kambei and Katsushiro attempted on Gorobei.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Who made up the Magnificent Seven? Six actors who became major stars — and Brad Dexter. (Horst Buchholz had a huge career in Germany.)
• Naïve Newcomer: Chico.
• Nervous Wreck: Lee, a deconstruction of the archetypal badass western gunslinger, has become completely paranoid due to frequent attempts on his life. The civilians over-charge him, knowing he has no choice but to pay, and his nerves are completely shot from his experiences.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Gunfight: Britt is challenged to a Duel to the Death by a Sore Loser of a speed contest, he effortlessly dispatches the gunslinger with a single lethal throw. Subverted in the final battle. After running out of bullets, Britt draws his knife and is shot and killed before he can throw it.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In a twisted way, Calvera sees the resistance put up by the seven as his punishment for being "merciful" to the villagers by not taking everything they owned.
  "Generosity! That was my first mistake. I leave these people a little bit extra and they hire these men to make trouble! It shows you, sooner or later you must answer for every good deed."
• Noodle Incident:
  • Vin answers the question in Evil Cannot Comprehend Good above with a story about a man he witnessed jumping buck naked into a patch of cactus. "He said it seemed like a good idea at the time."
  • It's never explained why Lee was looking for the Johnson Brothers, although it's easy to hazard a guess.
  • It's never explained why Britt changed his mind about joining the Seven.
  • Some of O'Reilly's exploits:
  Chris: Harry said you faced bigger odds in the Travis County War.
  O'Reilly: They paid me $500 for that one.
  Vin: He also said you got that Salinas thing cleaned up in less than a month.
  O'Reilly: They paid me $800 for that one.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Yul Brynner (Russian) and Horst Buchholz (German) both sport their natural accents; the film tries to Handwave this by making Brynner's character a Cajun and Buchholz's a Mexican.
• The Notable Numeral: We'll give you one guess.
• Only in It for the Money: Harry Luck is convinced that there has to be some kind of hidden profit motivating Chris and the others to take on such an apparently unprofitable job, and spends most of the film trying to find out what it is. He is, accordingly, the only one of the seven who decides to walk away after Sotero sells them out to Calvera, when it becomes clear that there is no profit to be had. Subverted when Harry returns during the final shootout, saving Chris at the cost of his own life.
• The Paranoiac: Lee is a jumpy paranoid wreck due to his experienced and the fact people want him dead.
• Parents as People: O'Reilly's fan club think their parents are cowards, but he tells them that their situation is much more complicated than they think.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Subverted rather well. Calvera lets the seven go by taking their weapons and riding them out of town. His justification? An old Mexican quote: "A thief who steals from another thief is pardoned for a hundred years." Of course, he assumed that they were just Hired Guns who'd skip town the moment they were paid... By the end of the film, Calvera finds his assumptions were very, very wrong.
• The Perils of Being the Best: Lee is a deconstruction of the archetypal badass western gunslinger. He's a deadly gunman who has become completely paranoid due to frequent attacks on him, no civilian wants him around because of the inevitable violence that will happen when someone tries to kill Lee to take his fame and it spirals out of control, and his nerves are completely shot from his experiences.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Calvera tries this by letting the Seven live: besides not expecting them to come back, he doesn't want their friends returning for revenge. But this winds up being a huge, ultimately fatal miscalculation on his part.
  Britt: No one throws me my own gun and says "Run". Nobody.
• Profane Last Words: Two examples. After a group of young Mexican villagers say Bernardo's name as he dies from his wounds, he responds by saying, "That's damn right." The first casualty out of the Seven, Harry Luck, has this to say as he himself dies:
  Harry Luck: Well... I'll be damned. [dies]
  Chris Adams: Maybe you won't be.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The film lampshades this with the "only the farmers won" speech, just as the original film did. This is underscored by the fact that two of the Seven (O'Reilly and Britt) are killed after the battle is won and the bandits are fleeing.
• Quick Draw: Chris uses this in his attempt to convince Chico to go home: he tells Chico to clap as fast as he can before casually drawing his gun between the closing hands and inviting Chico to match the feat.
• The Quiet One: Britt has eleven total lines of dialogue; Lee has sixteen total lines. Britt's lines also tend to be short. In his introductory scene, he only speaks five words.
• Rated M for Manly: Between Calvera and the titular seven, if you weaponized these levels of sheer badassitude, you could easily kill millions.
• The Real Heroes: Bernardo tells the kids that hang around him that their fathers are the real heroes, since being a farmer and a dad means lots of hard work and responsibility. He says he's never had the courage to do that, which is why he's a gunslinger.
• Recruit the Muggles: The villagers hire the eponymous gunmen to defend them against the outlaws, but shoot plenty of antagonists themselves (and take plenty of corresponding losses) in the climax.
• Redemption Equals Death: Lee, who had struggled with cowardice throughout the whole movie, dies five seconds after he saves a group of villagers. Harry dies when he saves a cornered Chris from certain death.
• Repurposed Pop Song: The title theme's main riff is widely known for its later use in Marlboro cigarette commercials and Arthur Conley's 1968 hit "Sweel Soul Music".
  • In Australia, a knockoff of the tune was famously used for Victoria Bitter ads.
• Rugged Scar: Invoked, then inverted. While looking for gunmen to hire, one farmer suggests one that has lots of scars on his face, thinking that scars are a sign of toughness. Another farmer replies that "The man for us is the one who gave him that face."
• The Runt at the End: Chico tags along behind the other more experienced gunslingers on the ride to the Mexican village.
• Sarcasm-Blind:
  • Annoyed with Chico, Vin and Chris sarcastically suggest that he go and ask Calvera his plans for the night. Chico does exactly that, infiltrating Calvera's camp and even speaking directly with Calvera under the cover of the particularly dim fire in the camp. Without being discovered as a spy, Chico slips away from Calvera's camp, returns to the village, and tells everyone the awful truth that Calvera's men are starving and have nowhere else to turn for food.
  • The children tell Bernardo if he dies, there will always be fresh flowers on his grave, he replies "such a comfort". The sarcasm flies over the kids' heads.
• Say My Name: Bernardo invokes this as he dies. Chris and Britt also both end the scene introducing Britt with it:
  Chris: Britt.
  Britt: Chris.
• Scrap Heap Hero: Lee starts as a sunsetting gunfighter, who lives hiding from his numerous enemies, fearing the bullet faster than his own which will eventually kill him. He hides even during the first confrontation with Calvera. But, during the climax, he faces his demons and saves a group of farmers, quickly dispatching a bunch of bandits and showing that he really is a hell of a gunfighter. After this, his posture and expression seem to show that he has regained the courage of his old days (and, in a twist of irony, he is then immediately killed by a random bullet).
• Sequel: Return of the Seven (1966), Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), The Magnificent Seven Ride (1972). Save for Yul Brynner in Return, none of the original cast appear in any of these.
• Setting Update: The film transplants a story set in feudal-era Japan based on a story from Bronze-Age Greece into the Wild West.
• Shirtless Scene: Both Harry and O'Reilly while digging a ditch.
• The Siege: The film's last fight follows the bandits' attempt to siege the village.
• Sixth Ranger: There is a bit of this going on in two ways. Chico is viewed as this by the other characters, although Lee, unlike the others, does not have a counterpart in Seven Samurai and was created specifically for the film, making him also a Sixth Ranger.
• Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: All the titular seven are males, the villain is male, and most of the supporting cast are male. Petra, Chico's Token Romance, is the only female with a speaking part. Surprisingly, when it was remade as a TV series, they didn't give one of the seven a Gender Flip, but instead included a female journalist as a significant character.
• Smug Snake: Calvera is pompous and loves to hear himself talk.
• So Much for Stealth: After being driven out of the village, the gunmen (minus Harry) attempt to sneak back in and take it back. That goes out the window when Vin is forced to shoot a bandit that sees him, kicking off the final shoot-out.
• South of the Border: All four films take place in Mexico.
• Spared by the Adaptation: The Village Elder, who died in Kurosawa's film, survives in this film. Chico, as a composite of Kikuchiyo (who died) and Katsushiro (who survived), makes for a half-example.
• The Stoic: Pretty much every one of the seven — except Chico — falls under this trope; the other six have seen so much in their day that it takes a lot to unnerve them.
• Super Fly Reflexes: Lee's sitting at a table wrestling with his personal demons. Three flies appear by his cup, his hand flashes out, and...
  Lee: [sighs] "One... Time was when I would have got all three".
• The Team Wannabe: Chico.
• Token Romance: Chico and Petra.
• Training the Peaceful Villagers: The Trope Codifier for Western filmography.
• Twilight of the Old West: A constant undertone throughout the film. Many of the Seven are facing the prospect of becoming has-beens without a purpose in the newly "civilized" West — and it's indicated that this is a major reason they accept the job: it makes them feel needed. (This parallels Kurosawa's original film, where the samurai are ronin who are suffering the end of the feudal era of Japan.) Calvera too laments how it's getting harder and harder for his bandit gang to steal enough to live off of now that the frontier is getting more civilized.
• Ungrateful Townsfolk: A small group of the villagers betray the Seven and allow Calvera into the village after they learn that Calvera cannot simply move on and raid another village, which was what they had hoped would happen when he discovered that the village had hired gunmen. The Seven understand their reasoning, even defending their actions when their children denounce them as cowards, and still return to save the village after Calvera released them far from the territory.
• Unusual Euphemism: "Elected" for being shot.
  Vin: [After an exchange of gunfire] You elected?
  Chris: [Looking at his cigar that has been shot in half] No, but I got nominated real good.
• Unwanted Assistance:
  • Bernardo's Instant Fanclub follows him everywhere and tries to help him in any way they can; they get him killed in the final battle when they distract him during a gunfight.
  • Earlier, Calvera is talking to Sotero about how they tried to rob a church, only to find nothing worth taking. A bandit watching nearby helpfully adds that they took what was there anyway. Calvera doesn't appreciate the remark very well.
• Walk-In Chime-In: One of the villagers declares that Calvera will be leaving the village. Chico, who has infiltrated Calvera's gang, enters and announces, "No, he will not".
• Wall Slump: Lee's death falls under this trope.
• Wasteland Elder: The Old Man is probably the ur-example for the Western.
• Weapon Specialization: Averted. None of the Seven have specialized weapons except Britt, who is equally adept with a throwing knife as with his gun.
• The Western
• What You Are in the Dark
  Harry: Come on, Lee. If they want to get killed, let 'em.
  Chris: Go ahead, Lee. You don't owe anything to anybody.
  Lee: Except to myself.
• When You Snatch the Pebble: Chris gives Chico the following test: Chris will clap his hands and Chico has to draw his gun fast enough so that the gun will be stuck between the closing hands. Chico does not pass the test.
• White Man's Burden: The Seven are mainly white Americans (except Chico, who is Mexican, and Bernardo, who is half-Irish half-Mexican). They decide to defend helpless Mexican villagers. Although thanks to some prodding by the Mexican censors, the farmers are first trying to get guns to defend the village themselves - only hiring men when Chris suggests that might be cheaper. And the villagers get involved in the fighting at the end.
• The Women Are Safe with Us: The villagers hide their women because they're afraid the hired guns will rape them. Chris acknowledges that their fears are not entirely unjustified (not all gunslingers being as noble as the seven, after all) but opines that "you might have given us the benefit of the doubt."
• Young Gun: Chico may be a young hot-head, but he proves to be good with his gun, familiar with the countryside and farming villages like the one they're defending, and generally quite clever.

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"The old man was right. We lost. We always lose."